It’s hard to imagine a more exciting Beethoven Ninth Symphony than the one performed Thursday night by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and company. The vocal soloists could have been subtler, but both the orchestra and the Dallas Symphony Chorus performed as if wired to electric generators, and not low-voltage ones.

This concert, also including the two Violin Romances, began the orchestra’s contribution to a nearly three-week Beethoven Festival, also including the composer’s violin sonatas and select piano trios. It was also music director Jaap van Zweden’s first time back on the podium since early March.

Part of the symphony’s electricity came from pressing tempos at least in the neighborhood of Beethoven’s often brisk (and often disregarded) metronome markings. When van Zweden was a little slower, as in the first movement, he made it work in a hall — the well-filled Meyerson Symphony Center — much larger than early 19th-century forebears.

Tempos aside, van Zweden had an almost supernatural way of tightening tension and whipping up excitement. It was partly a matter of accenting accents, partly of pushing phrases up and out and forward, partly of squeezing passing dissonances. Even the slow movement, taken close to Beethoven’s mobile markings, was a marvel of molded lines and caressed harmonies.

The one unconvincing gesture was the jarring speedup after the tenor’s solo, which should be at the same tempo as the ensuing orchestra fugue. The text, after all, is about suns flying through the heavens and heros running their courses. (The solo’s per-minute metronome marking here is almost certainly attached to the wrong note value.)

The orchestra’s playing was brilliant, dramatic, exquisitely detailed, finely finished. In a symphony that impressed at least one first hearer as a timpani concerto, DSO timpanist Brian Jones slammed and rattled up a storm. Winds and horns contributed some breathtaking, and beautifully shaped, pianissimos. Filling almost the entire choral terrace, the chorus, prepared by Joshua Habermann, projected awesome walls of sound.

The score gives the vocal soloists few dynamic directions, and soprano Erin Wall, alto Tamara Mumford, tenor Clifton Forbis and bass Raymond Aceto mainly went for maximum decibels, impressive as they were, often at the expense of vocal lines.

Concertmaster Alexander Kerr got the more romantic Second Romance, and played it lovingly and beautifully. In the less lyrical First Romance, co-concertmaster Nathan Olson skillfully dispatched the double stops, without quite making poetry of the piece. Van Zweden and a reduced complement of the orchestra accompanied quite sensitively.